Jack in the Box, page 20
“Wait a minute,” I suddenly said. “I need to speak with Kevin. He has to explain to me how he could possibly dump both Lincoln Center and me together like this … with no time for us to react, no time to even think! I’ll get back to you!” And immediately, I dialed Kevin’s number.
When he answered he was unquestionably distraught, not cavalier, not arch, not uncaring at all. He explained why he had suddenly got such cold feet that he couldn’t even sleep. “I can’t appear before an audience like myself, thin, gaunt, fucking transparent, practically … And then put on fat padding and all the rest of it: they’ll never believe me. They’ll never be able to see anything but the lie … me and a costume, and no one will be able … no one will allow themselves to hear me as Falstaff at all!”
I was silent. I could hear his breathing on the other end of the line, and after his impassioned outburst, he really had nothing left to say. He felt powerless, and I got it. I had been clinging to a concept I had created not only to exploit John Goodman’s celebrity but also to help him and his audience watch him grow even greater in girth and width, into a legendary, unimaginable size: I was not just building on it, I was depending on it. It was a swell solution for Goodman, but it was also one million miles away from the kind of careful, skillful, intellectual approach Kevin took with everything. I was basically hurling John’s underwear at him and saying, “Like it or lump it!”
“Kevin, I’m so sorry,” I began. “You’re right! Listen, forget it. Forget the whole thing. I want to do this play, and I want to do it not only with you, but for you! I know the damned thing backward, I swear I do. We don’t need any of this. We could do the fucking play clad only in jockstraps and on bicycles. I’ll throw all of this away; I promise you I will. Let’s start over. Let’s just do the damned play together!”
I was so passionately immersed in the bravery of my declaration, so stunned at my immediate willingness to hurl into the abyss everything I had so patently been protecting up to that point and suggest we could just start over, that I am afraid I have no memory of Kevin’s reaction whatsoever. I blush to admit it, but I was so high on my own reaction, and the nobility of the idea so deafened my ears, that I shut everything else out.
Well, okay, sometimes that happens. Nevertheless, it was the right thing to say and to do. Kevin must have said fine, or some relaxed version of it, because the following Tuesday I began to work on a completely different approach to this great play with a completely different company from the San Diego version, and a completely different interpreter in the great role of Falstaff.
Rehearsals were something entirely different this time around. I cannot recall any memories of the Globe production that don’t feel suffused in nostalgia, discovery, and delight. To be sure, the production in San Diego wasn’t on quite the same level in either articulation or expectation. The Globe had been known for an annual festival of a three-play repertory of Shakespeare every summer from practically the forties on. Our Henry IV out there was just another leaf in that evolving volume. But when you add a New York expectation, when you add commercial actors unused to appearing in plays of “elevated text,” you are no longer on the same playing field. So that vaguely purplish cloud hung over the weeks leading up to the first preview, and a cloud of expectation would prove the least of it.
I was blocking some scene or another when members of the stage management entered the room to interrupt my train of thought. Down a level or two, somewhere else in the building, a fight rehearsal had been unfolding between the Prince Hal of Billy Crudup and the Hotspur of Ethan Hawke. But, suddenly, inexplicably, Billy collapsed, sobbing, crumpling against a wall, unable to pull himself together. Ethan was vaguely nonplussed, as were the stage management, but there was no going on, no explanation. Billy immediately left the rehearsal as well as the building.
It was perhaps another day or day and a half before we got the answer: unbeknownst to anyone, Billy was in the process of breaking up his longtime relationship with the gifted actress Mary Louise Parker, who, even worse, was pregnant with their child, and if she was understandably distraught, he was teetering on the edge of a complete emotional breakdown.
There was to be no coming back from this, no two days off for recuperation, virtually no recourse. Billy had to withdraw and attend to the seriousness of his personal life, and I had to find myself another Prince Hal. And quickly. It didn’t seem right to enlist David Lansbury, thus surrounding Kevin with a Hal, a King Henry, as well as a Glendower and a Poins, all of whom would have participated in another, different production. And the list of Young Leading American Men Capable of Standing Up Against the Evolving Falstaff of Kevin Kline was probably somewhat shorter than one might imagine. But high on the Lincoln Center list was someone I had watched over the years with eagerness and envy … Michael Hayden, whose Billy Bigelow in the National Theatre’s Carousel had been widely admired, and who had appeared in that production when it transferred to the Beaumont at Lincoln Center, as well as having played the lead in one of A. R. Gurney’s plays in a different season. The call went out, the reply came back, and in merely two days, Michael Hayden found himself repeating the same sword-and-dagger choreography abandoned days before by Billy Crudup. I cannot recall this period without hearing a sullen, stiff-lipped retort from the edges of that rehearsal space by Ethan Hawke, who happened to be experiencing the dissolution of his own marriage to Uma Thurman at the very same time: “Jesus Christ!” he growled to no one in particular. “My marriage is falling apart, too, but I managed to fucking show up!”
It was during the rehearsal process that one became so aware of the differences between the “Kevin That Was” and the “Kevin That Had Become.” The play is as vast as the most challenging musical theatre or opera piece, and as disparate. There are tavern scenes, domestic scenes, wars, quarrels, politics, death, and transfiguration everywhere you look. The day had to be carefully calibrated in precise sections in order to take advantage of the extremely expensive hours of rehearsal, and make certain all the details were getting hammered out, parsed, explored, made comfortable, and then effortlessly rendered organic. Kevin would inevitably arrive perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes late, unapologetic, unaware that everyone had been waiting. He would get calmly into his fat padding, and then stand back before a full-length mirror, turning this way and that, admiring his profile, staring over his shoulder at his backside. He might well have just been called from his trailer to the back lot. As a film star of some significance, that was now more or less what he was used to. This might have appeared indulgent to the uninitiated, but I could see he was also beginning to “believe” in this shape, this girth, and was testing the natural way someone that large would move, would bend, would sit … Was he also preening? Okay, maybe a bit. But he was having such delicious time exploring that even though those of us involved in the scene yet to be staged were waiting on him, he rarely glanced in our direction, even when I pretended to stamp my feet and said, “Kevin … Kevin! The rehearsal’s going on over here!” He would finally bustle over, chortling, deeply pleased with the aspects, and unless we were stumbling over a passage he would have preferred to have been cut or edited in some other way—and such objections were intellectually intuitive, probing, and often necessary—it would be fully twenty minutes into the allotted rehearsal time before I got a single moment with him, eye to eye.
Then, of course, we’d rehearse. Now, Kevin, being every inch the film star at this point, and without seeming to lord it over anyone, threw himself into the process with the same intellectual acuity he’d demonstrated all his life. But it wasn’t as if he were overly aware there were other scenes to be rehearsed, other characters to be delineated. Once on the rehearsal floor, he would luxuriate in every aspect of being an actor: “Let’s try this, shall we?” Or, “What if I just…?” Endlessly inventive, curious about every fragment of text and each impulse, he was Falstaffianly the center of his own universe, and ready to simply unpack and live there. You really couldn’t point out that we were already twenty-five minutes late in the process, and there was the Hotspur–Lady Percy scene in the wings … One could actually see Ethan Hawke and Audra McDonald running lines just out of eyesight. Kevin was in his element, fat padding and all, and if, as usual, we struck sparks and found something both delicious and apt, which would have to serve for today’s slender bounty, it would take another ten to fifteen minutes before getting him out of the rehearsal space. There was always another option, another choice, some bit of physical comedy he’d wondered about … and what made it all endurable was his complete lack of awareness that anyone else was to be accorded a turn. It was frustrating, often, but it was our little world.
Everyone didn’t think so, necessarily. Although the company basically took all this in stride, Easton alone appeared to observe Kevin from a considerable height, polite, diffident, but with a slight frozen smile playing about his lips. He wasn’t buying it, ultimately, and although we never actually spoke about it, I realized that he had had immense affection and loyalty for the original Falstaff of his recent experience, and found Kevin’s circle of specialness something of an irritant. As king, of course, he had every right, and one was always aware of Richard’s perspective on rehearsal behavior as a vat of existential experience to be sampled, applied, observed. The two actors might have been in two different plays, which, in fact, I suppose they were. I don’t recall a single conversation between them, a moment of camaraderie unique to matched professionals with a keen sense of appreciation for the strengths of the other. Kevin was genuinely witty, of course, and his roots as something of a class clown were ever on display. And inevitably, when he got off a jest or a sarcastic comment that landed, Richard laughed along with the others. But I knew Richard well. He had two laughs. One looked very much like the crinkled posing of a Toby jug, fixed, the image, rather, of laughter. The other was genuine. I recall hearing only one of them over the run.
The Henrys were pretty much a complete triumph, and they deserved to be. Gloriously designed by Ralph Funicello and Jess Goldstein, lit like a Renaissance painting by Brian MacDevitt, backed by a score of cinematic range by Mark Bennett, and exploding with the fights, the wars, the pyrotechnical fireworks of Steve Rankin and Greg Meeh—making the mano a mano conflicts, for once, harrowing, bloody, and convincing—and with the entire company delivering meticulous, layered, and passionate performances, it won the Tony that year for Best Revival of a Play, and I was given my second as its director. Kevin was a pain in the ass, somewhat understandably, submerged in enough fat padding and prosthetics to disguise a battleship, but a pain in the ass nevertheless. The weight of the costume, the physical effort necessary to sustain this monumental characterization, nearly defeated him. We continued to simplify the costume, take out unnecessary additional decorations, and even put ice packs within the folds, all to no avail. Jess Goldstein put himself through a wringer trying to please Kevin, but to see the actor at the end of a performance, splayed out in a chair, exhausted, with nothing but tons of discarded upholstery drenched around his feet, was to understand just how harrowing “being” and “doing” were proving to be.
When it came to farce, Kevin could be airborne, lighter and more deft than a ballet dancer, inspired and risk averse. But in a drama he became almost a Talmudic scholar, analyzing every word, every phrase, challenging every choice dramaturge Dakin Matthews had suggested, suspicious always, of course, that the choices were intrinsically Dakin’s for Dakin’s possible Falstaff, and not his at all. So when it was stage business one sought, no one could outdo Kline. The mere idea of needing to use his sword to hoist himself up from the floor was a perfect example of something he discovered by himself, both hilarious and completely understandable. The performance was the architectural model of the actor himself—all bluster and bravura effect on the plush and overstuffed outside, a shell, masking a cusp of insecurity and emotional fragility on the inside. And nowhere was this more dazzlingly evident than in the glorious interchange between Falstaff and Justice Shallow, in the latter part of the plays. With the inestimable “downtown” New York star Jeff Weiss as a potato chip remnant of his former self as Shallow, he and Kline sat directly across from each other in profile, ruminating in agonizing detail and with endlessly hilarious pauses, about everyone they’d ever known, all now long since dead. It is almost always a great scene. With two masters of farce, so elegant as not to appear to be acting at all, it was nothing short of sublime. I rarely missed an opportunity to watch it.
Difficult theatrical births are by definition difficult, and if not always remembered as such, bear lasting scars in the minds of those who were there; the blessed theatrical events seem to unspool as from above by their own accord. Yes, one struggles to get the moment right, the cues ordered, the entire event balanced, but in those magical conditions, the director seems more a mâitre d’ than a martinet or imperious conductor, swaying above the action. At least, that’s how it has felt for me, and I count among my many blessings a rather remarkable list of similar experiences. It’s surrendering to events like these that reminds one that, honestly, it’s never one person’s vision, or effort, or truth. The community has testified, and the play has responded in kind, a massive, resounding bell, but the noise is not entirely yours, finally: it’s its own.
I imagine that the New York company, being probably more homogenous in terms of experience, clout, and professional profile than the Globe company, might help to explain the differences in how the two productions were received. Goodman, being Goodman (as opposed to being caviar to the general), created something of a sensation in San Diego, and though Easton and Lansbury and the others all got lovely notices, as did the production, most of the notices began and lingered on Kevin’s Falstaff. In spite of everything, the actor, or perhaps the part, emerged as more than newsworthy. In New York, we had all probably got marginally better, at least those of us experiencing a second turn at bat; but although Kevin and Richard and Ethan and Michael and, frankly, almost everyone listed came in for their own paragraphs of praise, the result, even in memory, feels more ensemble- than star-oriented. Kevin turned in a truly original performance, deft, specific, hauntingly intellectual: his Falstaff was a wreck of a man, both physically and morally. He received probing, celebratory press. He always receives great reviews. That faint “but” was once more hovering somewhere in the air over many of them, but not before they offered a plethora of praise for this gesture, that speech. His Falstaff was original, no question. If he felt tangentially apart from owning the entire effect, it was also the objectivity, the clarity that distinguished it.
John had lumbered; John had crashed through it. John had brayed his pain. And he had triumphed as well … Take your pick …
3. THE FALLOUT
Well into the run, I was led to believe that John Goodman somehow decided he had to see it for himself. We had never communicated about his not getting the opportunity to revisit the role in New York. I don’t believe he blamed me for the choice any more than I could have been blamed. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt and hurt badly. So eventually, on his own, and to my knowledge without collusion with anyone involved, he took it upon himself to fly to New York to basically bear witness. It had to take considerable courage, and I imagine he wrestled with the issue for some time before getting on a plane. But he took a room across the street from Lincoln Center at the Empire Hotel, and bought a ticket for the play. I’m not altogether certain he was alone, but I believe he must have been.
The afternoon before he was to attend the evening performance, curiosity got the better of him, and he decided he deeply wanted just to see the set—perhaps to reassure himself in advance that it wasn’t going to be a mirror image of what we’d all done in San Diego … I’m not sure. But he walked across the street to the Beaumont and entered the nearly abandoned lobby. It was not a matinee day. Only one of the two usual security men was on duty. John explained that he wanted only to look inside, just to see the set, not to intrude, not to go onstage, just to look. The security guard had one job, and that job was to see that no one not connected with the organization went into the theatre before curtain time. Ever. Period.
They argued; John persisted and got angrier and angrier … What was the problem? What was the offense? Just one fucking look, that is all he was asking.
But the guard had his orders, and he had his job. The answer was no! We have to assume, furthermore, that this guard was neither a television fan nor a moviegoer, which would explain his not recognizing Goodman.
Was there a physical tussle of some kind? Did anyone push? Did anyone shove back? I’ve never had occasion to confront either of the participants, but it doesn’t finally matter all that much. What does matter is that John Goodman, a bona fide actor who had already played the role of Falstaff with considerable distinction, was denied entrance to the Vivian Beaumont Theater that afternoon, and in being so spurned, he turned on his heel, mounted the steps to the front door, and smashed through it, glass flying every which way, retreating back to the Empire Hotel, where he ordered a bottle sent up to his room. He never saw the play.
